Has Technology Improved Your Hiring?

Technology comes at a cost. Escalators were clearly preferable to stairs, but now half of us are in the gym on the stair climbers to make up for it.

How have the latest technological advances in recruiting improved your hiring process? It’s a safe bet that you’ve had mixed results. Even the best tech breakthroughs have unexpected consequences, right? Escalators were clearly preferable to stairs, but now half of us are in the gym on the stair climbers to make up for it.

Applicant tracking systems and résumé parsing technology may be no different. They have streamlined the hiring process from job requisition through hire. Meanwhile, social media, job aggregators and job alerts have rapidly expanded our pool of applicants. But has this technology improved the results of hiring? Are we hiring better now?

Well, the intentions were clear: Expand the pool of applicants to the maximum and automate the filtering process to propel the best candidates to the top of the call list.

Did it work?

According to a recent study, the timeline to get through the interview process has nearly doubled in recent years, from the average 13 days to 23. The experts conducting the study point to increased screening procedures, ranging from drug tests to IQ tests, and sometimes personality tests. But this extended wait time might also be a result of having too many applicants.

With the rise of job board aggregators and the proliferation of duplicate job posts throughout the internet, it has become a little too easy for under-qualified candidates to apply for jobs they might otherwise never have seen or considered. Applicants can be pretty cavalier. One study discovered that job seekers only spent an average of 76 seconds scrutinizing a job post before deeming it a “good fit.”

Recruiting technology allows us to cast a broader net. And that is fantastic, but it also forces us to double down on our applicant filtering efforts. Perhaps the wait is worth it—but for how long?

Employee turnover rates continue to increase, and the rate appears to be picking up. Does low employee retention reflect better hiring? It’s certainly difficult to make the case. But more importantly, high employee turnover combined with an increasingly longer hiring process could spell disaster.

The take away

Technology is obviously not a terrible thing. But it needs to continually evolve in order to solve the new problems it creates. This is true across all industries. For the job board market right now, it means finding better ways to accurately match the best possible applicants to a given job as quickly as possible.

ITJobMatch allows employers to begin their search at the short list by matching candidates’ skills to the skills required for the job. ITJobMatch provides a “percent fit” match that is easy to understand, and cuts to the chase. It’s not rocket science; just a simple solution to the latest hiring challenge.